


Repentance

by Imagining_in_the_Margins



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Feelings, Fluff and Angst, Friendship/Love, Gender-Neutral Pronouns, Hurt/Comfort, Near Death Experiences, Other, Romance, Self Confidence Issues, Self-Hatred, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-04
Updated: 2020-06-04
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:00:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24531178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Imagining_in_the_Margins/pseuds/Imagining_in_the_Margins
Summary: Spencer is confronted with his second chance at life, finding it full of regrets. Reader tries to talk him through it.
Relationships: Spencer Reid/Reader
Comments: 1
Kudos: 41





	Repentance

The thing about rooming with Spencer is that you never really know what you’ll find when you wake up in the middle of the night. Some nights, I would glance over to find him in a silent, deep sleep in the other bed. Those nights were few and far between.

More often, he’d be slowly flipping through a book, his normal feverish pace slowed to what one might call “above average” rather than insane. His eyes would glaze over, taking their time to read the words. On those nights, it was clear he was trying desperately to distract his mind from whatever was tormenting it.

Sometimes he’d be pacing the room, lost in his own thoughts, muttering softly to himself. He always felt so guilty on those nights, because once he noticed I was awake, he would immediately start apologizing… and then talk my ear off until the sun came up.

But I’d never woken up to find he wasn’t there at all— not until now.

“Spencer?” I called into the obviously empty room, considering his keycard was missing from the desk next to his bed. “Are you here?”

Just as I expected, no one answered. My heart leapt into my throat as I imagined all of the horrible reasons why he could be missing, but logic pushed them away. After all, if there were a struggle, I surely would have woken up.

His gun and badge were still on the nightstand, along with a tiny piece of hotel stationery marked with his familiar chicken scratch.

‘ _Stepped out. I’ll be back._ ’

I glanced over at the clock. The neon red LED read 1:17AM.

He was thoughtful enough to leave a note, but it didn’t make me less upset with him. We were in some small, strange, backwater of a dirt-road town where there was a serial killer running loose, and he decided to just go for a midnight stroll?

Tossing my legs over the side of the bed, I tried to stretch my tired muscles that had worked themselves into knots over the past few days of cheap motel mattresses and way too much work.

No wonder he couldn’t sleep.

My hand hovered over my service weapon, wondering if it would be a good idea for me to bring it while I searched for him. It made sense that I would want to have it, but the fact that he had left his behind told me that he must be in a seriously fragile state of mind.

I decided that it wouldn’t be worth it to make him uncomfortable, slipping into something more appropriate for… well, the nobody that would be out at this hour.

The sound of crickets chirping and frogs croaking filled the air, creating an unnecessarily romantic atmosphere in this bleak little town. Without a thought, my feet began carrying me down the long row of rooms towards the church next door.

I don’t know how I knew he would be there, but I did. And he was, his feet dragging along the dirt as he swayed back and forth on the children’s swing that he barely fit on.

It would have been an adorable sight if he didn’t look so solemn; he was so lost in his thoughts that I don’t think he even heard me approach him until I was practically in front of him.

“Spencer?” I called softly, those amiable brown eyes seemingly staring straight through me. “Why are you out here?”

His empty gaze was gone just as quickly as they’d come to me, instead settling back on our feet as he slowed to a stop.

“I couldn’t sleep.” 

“Well, that’s not that new for you.”

The gentle tease earned me the tiniest smile. I took a few steps over the loose pebbles covering the ground, settling on the swing beside him and wrapping my arms tighter around me to both hide from the breeze and his suspicions. I didn’t realize how much the temperature had dropped before I left the room in shorts and a t-shirt.

“You should go back inside. You look cold.” The genuine concern masked his desire to sulk in isolation. I wasn’t falling for it.

“How perceptive, Dr. Reid,” I joked through chattering teeth.

“That’s what they pay me for.”

At least he was still able to laugh, however short lived the sound was. We waited another moment in silence, both of us testing how dedicated I was. But it would take a blizzard for me to leave him out here like this.

Seeing the pain etched all over his features physically hurt.

“Talk to me, Spencer.”

Raising his head to stare off into the distance, his mouth fumbled with the wrong words. The image of him tongue tied was peculiar and troubling. I hated it.

“What do you see when you look back on your life?” His tone warned me that he meant for me to take the question very seriously. It gave me an ominous feeling, the way his head slowly turned to look at me through the darkness.

His eyes had already adjusted to the dim light of the flickering street lamp; he’d been here too long.

“It depends on which part.” It was an honest answer, albeit a bit of a cop out. He didn’t fall for it.

“But overall? Are you… are you happy with it?”

“Sometimes. Usually.” A lie, but one intended to make him feel better. At this point in our friendship, we had a deeper understanding of the other. It only took a few mental breakdowns on and off the field for us to recognize the sadness that bubbled beneath the surface.

Spencer Reid was troubled, and so was I. We didn’t really talk about it; usually we just held each other until the tears stopped. The next day, we wouldn’t talk about it. After so many trips to the same work-mandated psychologist, I guess we had both realized that we’re too good at lying about our feelings, anyway.

So… why bother prompting this conversation?

“Why do you ask?” That was my way of asking him. What happened today, or this week, or this year that suddenly made him need to open up? What did that mean for where he was inside that brilliant mind?

It scared me.

“I’ve just been thinking about it a lot and… all I can think about…”

A breath shuddered from his lungs, his hands folding and unfolding in his lap. It wasn’t that strange for him to be fidgeting; he did it more often than he didn’t. What worried me was the fact that he couldn’t seem to complete any of his thoughts.

“When Tobias saved my life all those years ago, I viewed it as a second chance. I wanted to start over, but every move I made I just..”

He was usually so much more eloquent than this. The last time he was so uncertain and hesitant in his words, he’d never finished saying them at all.

That was the first night after he was released from prison. He had shown up at my door, smelling vaguely of whiskey and smoke.

‘ _I need_ …’ _he’d started, pausing with a terrifying apathy. ‘Please, help me.’_

_So, I had taken him in my arms, practically carrying his inebriated, limp body to my couch. The moment his head landed on my lap, his tears fell onto the clean skin of my thigh. His hands had hovered over my leg, obviously scared to touch me, but wishing that he could._

_In the end, he didn’t. As soon as my hands combed through his hair, his eyes had fluttered shut. Those soft brown locks had grown so wild and long, but they never stopped feeling like silk under my fingers._

Returning to the present, I wondered why he didn’t cut it all off again, but I think I knew the answer.

“I know that I’m here now, and that I was successfully revived and my body shows no sign of remaining physical damage.” His voice shook and broke, a heavy hand raising to rub circles into his eyes before he met my gaze once more. “So why does it still feel like I died there that night?”

“You didn’t.” Shaking my head, I could hear the words he was going to say before he spoke them. Still, he said them anyway.

“Sometimes I wonder… I wonder if… If I should have.”

The words felt like ice running through my veins, my heart stopping just long enough for me to miss its comforting rhythm.

“Spencer…” I spoke his names more like a beg, my eyes filling with tears that didn’t dare to fall yet. God knows he doesn’t need to feel like he’s hurt me as badly as he had by speaking those words.

“I was given a chance most people could only dream of. I was brought back from the dead, and what did I do? I immediately turned to Dilaudid. When that was over, I-I lost Maeve.”

I cringed at the name, wishing that I could help, but knowing that I was useless on _that_ topic. Luckily, it didn’t end there.

“I refused to let myself get close to anyone, and still found a way to fail over and over again. Gideon, Alex, JJ, Emily… my _mom_. I’ve failed _everyone_ that’s ever loved me.”

I barely noticed the way my hand reached out to him until it came into my vision, grabbing his arm and pulling our swings closer together. Linking my arm around his, I hugged it against my chest.

He looked down at me with rapt fascination that quickly retreated, fading yet again into unreadable brown eyes. He hadn’t lied when he said that he refused to let people close to him. In that moment, he’d never felt so close yet so far away.

I wanted to scream, _You’ve never failed me_!

But this wasn’t the time for confessions. This wasn’t the time to make it about me and my feelings. Instead, I opted for a much safer sweeping statement, “That’s not true. You didn’t fail them.”

With a slight nod, he dismissed my words as ignorance. I didn’t know how to convince him.

“Eventually, everyone leaves. They leave because—“ He bit his tongue before he could finish that thought, quickly shifting the conversation back to my apparently flawed perception. “How can you look at me and not see every mistake I’ve made?”

I held him closer, wondering how he didn’t notice the warmth that literally emanated from him. “Spencer, there are many things I see when I look at you.”

And I looked at him, seeing the red tint of his sclera and the bags under his eyes, his lip trembling from the cold and the overwhelming emotional turmoil.

“Any single decision or mistake you made can’t define who you are. We are _all_ more than that.” My free hand came up to gently brush away the strands of hair that he’d let fall.

“What if— What if the sum of all of my parts, everything that makes me who I am, is still bad?”

He trembled under my fingers, but it wasn’t from the cold. From the way his hands opened and closed, seeking something to hold, I knew he was doing the same thing he’d done that night.

“It’s not, Spencer.”

I wished he would understand that I would never hate him for needing someone to hold sometimes. We all did.

“You don’t know that,” he said, his words coming faster and with more force, “You don’t **know** what goes on in my mind. I’m—“

The sentence ended abruptly, like he choked on the next word. I wouldn’t ever know what it was going to be, because he ran from it once more. “ _Every_ day since my first night in the prison I look at myself and I barely recognize the person in front of me.”

My hand slid over the scruff on his cheek, the roughness contrasting the gentle demeanor that, despite his objection, I was convinced still remained.

“I hate him.” He whispered as my thumb caught his tears, leaving my own to drip down the side of my face. “The longer I see him, the more lost I feel. Like the person I used to be is still stuck in limbo on the floor of that old cemetery shed and he’ll never come back, so what’s the point?”

 _What was the point?_ It was a question I’d asked myself so many times. But I was lucky, having the answer staring back at me right then.

Because no matter how dreadful things were, no matter how much pain I was in, I knew that Spencer would be there. This was my chance to return the favor— to show him that I could be his reason the same way he was mine.

“What do you mean?” I tried to tell him with my eyes, my tongue too scared to make any other words.

“I… I guess my question is do you… Do you think it’s too late for me?”

His voice had grown in volume and speed. I loved his rambling, but not like this. Usually when he stumbled over the words, it was because they were said with a joyous enthusiasm, not… this.

“I mean a-am I just doomed to be the person that I am?”

My arm tightened around his, my legs trying to maneuver him to face me more fully. I wished I had more hands so I could hold him the way he clearly needed to be held.

But right now, I just needed to keep his eyes on mine, and his body as close as it could be. I needed him to see and feel that he wasn’t alone.

“Spencer… That’s not a curse. I love the person that you are.”

There was a hint of a smile that quickly fell. He sucked his bottom lip into his mouth, biting back an obvious sob before he gave a bitter laugh, “You shouldn’t.”

“I don’t care,” I replied with an equally saturnine smile. He brought his hand up to mine, pulling it down to his lap before letting it go. At first, I was scared it was his way of subtly rejecting me.

In fact, he immediately followed the action by unhooking my arm from his. My feet remained rooted to the ground, although I slid back slightly amongst the pebbles. The distance quickly forming made the lack of his body heat even more obvious.

So, imagine my pleasant surprise when he pulled his cardigan off his shoulders, holding out the soft charcoal fabric to me. My smile this time was genuine, and so was the one he returned.

The smell of his cologne floated off the fabric as I slipped into its embrace, happy to find it still carried his warmth. Once it was on, I swayed over to him, hooking our legs together with a small chuckle.

The metal chains holding us up precariously twisted so that we could be face to face once more, this time with both hands free. I clung tightly to his calves with my legs, holding my hands out for him to take them.

He almost did, but stopped right before we touched.

“Why did you come out here?” The question danced around us, joined by the tender symphony of summer.

All I could do was shrug, muttering the obvious answer.

“I just told you. You’re… my friend. And I… I love you.”

Despite premising it with the explanation that I meant it in a platonic sense, I think we both knew that I was full of shit. Because I did love Spencer as a friend, but I loved him as something more, too.

The answer was enough for Spencer to slowly lower his hands, accepting the company mine offered. His eyes stayed on our hands, his thumbs gently rubbing circles on the backs of mine just as I’d wiped away his tears moments earlier.

“Tobias was a very troubled man, but… he saw the same man I see now. Even through everything, he saw that you were an undeniably _good_ man.”

This time when he looked up at me, I saw something else lurking below the suffering. The proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, signaling that somehow on a swing set in a church playground in the middle of nowhere, I’d found him for the first time.

“You think you’ve changed, and maybe you have. We all do. But you haven’t lost the things that made you good.”

His hands pulled me closer, subtly at first, but then more persistently. I didn’t stop, though, the words now pouring out of me just like his had fallen earlier.

“You are _still_ good, Spencer,” I whispered as more tears tipped past my eyelashes, “You have _always_ been good.”

With that, his hands found my face at the same time he leaned forward to bridge the gap between us. His mouth met mine sloppily and with an unmatched intensity.

Maybe if it had been anyone else, I would have considered it a red flag; that he only sought my affection while in crisis. But that wasn’t true. This kiss, while wonderful, was not the most intimate moment we’d shared.

But it was beautiful all the same. Running my hands through his hair the same way I had that night, I tried to return his persistent need to express the love that we’d kept hidden deep in our hearts.

There was no hiding for either of us anymore. Because in the flickering light, urged on by the dim lighting of the moon, we found each other and ourselves in the night. And when we broke apart, we didn’t go far.

With locked gazes and well-kissed lips, I told him the truth.

“Where you see the bad and darkness in you. I see the light. I see the good. I see _you_ , Spencer.” Biting my lip as I smiled, I didn’t even try to catch my breath as I finished, “And there is _nothing_ you can do that would make me change my mind.”

He swallowed hard, his breath fanning over my face as his eyes tried to detect any sign of deception. There was none to find. I was telling the only truth I knew.

Spencer Reid was a good man, and I would love him forever.

I tried to kiss him again, but he ducked away at the last second, closing his eyes as he pressed our foreheads together. It was his last attempt to shut me out, to keep that well maintained boundary around him.

“I don’t know how to love someone without hurting them,” he said under his breath, implicitly begging me to love him, anyway. But he didn’t need to ask. He had never needed to.

“Then hurt me, Spencer Reid.” I whispered, leaning forward to speak against the lips I’d waited years to kiss. “Because I’m confident that every second I get to be with you will be well worth whatever pain might follow.”


End file.
